12.5 Life Cycle assessments

Carried out to assess the environmental impacts of products or services

• Extracting and processing the raw materials • Manufacturing and packaging your product • Using, reusing and maintaining the product • Disposing of a product

• listing all the energy and material inputs and all the outputs into the environment • evaluating the potential environmental impacts from these inputs and outputs • interpreting the results to help make decisions about using one material, process, product or service over another

• damage the local environment through cutting down forests and mines • huge amounts of energy required • fractional distillation of crude oil • extracting metals from their ores • pollutants can be released

• energy use • pollution -> carbon monoxide + hydrogen chloride • waste products are useless

• space that could have been used for nature • energy used to transport items • burn waste -> release pollutants into the atmosphere • chemicals might seep out into the surrounding ecosystem

• How much damage it does during its lifetime • How polluting driving a car is • how long the product is used for

Raw material: crude oil Manufacturing and packaging: hydrocarbons from fractional distillation, cracked to make alkenes, polymerisation Using the product: can be reused multiple times Disposing of the product: not biodegradable, take up space in landfill, get into wild and harm animals

Raw material: wood Manufacturing and packaging: timber has to be pulped -> loads of energy, lots of waste Using the product: single use Disposing of the product: biodegradable, non toxic

• making products involved loads of different steps, almost impossible to quantify • difficult to assess the harm of each step • can be manipulated to deliberatley support a company, biased • subjective judgements • estimations made • dont take into account differences in the cost or performance

Peer review process included